GateIn Mobile Specifications

Status

Planning and prototyping.

Introduction

The number of users using mobile devices to access websites is increasing, and website developers need to provide websites to these users which are optimized for their devices. Currently there is no mobile solution built into GateIn.

'Mobile' devices can include mobile phones with small screen and tablets with larger screens that have resolutions which match or succeed those of traditional desktops. Its not always clear what a 'mobile' device is and how its content should be displayed differently. Newer versions of traditional desktops are also moving towards more touch friendly interfaces. We are going to need a solution which takes care of many variations between mobile devices and traditional desktops.

Mobile sites may wish to display drastically different, more simplified content from the main website. Current existing portal sites may not work properly on mobile devices without major updates to all their portlets and skins. This makes it very difficult to just automagically add in mobile support for existing sites.

Attached PDF contains a brief overview as well as information on the device detection and redirection sections of the spec.

Initial Scope and Planning

For our inital mobile solution, we wil focus on having a separate mobile specific portal and redirect users to this alternative portal site if we detect they are using a mobile device. This will allow for existing portals to be configured to use a redirect without having to modify their existing desktop portal.

The redirections will only happen between sites on the same portal instance. Support for any arbitrary external url or to sites running on another portal instance or GateIn instance may be added later if needed. But its not going to be included in the initial mobile offerings.

The mobile portal skin and containers should be written in a responsive manner, so that it looks and acts properly across different mobile phones, tablets and even desktops. This will allows us to have a default configuration which works across multiple device types. If the portal admin also updates their portlets to be responsive, there should be no reason why they would need multiple sites, since the 'mobile' site should work across all devices.

Specification

Device Detection

We need to be able to detect when a user should be redirected to an alternative site. This needs to be configurable and customizable by the portal admin, as they may wish to have different sites for different device classes (mobile phones, tablets, desktops, ...). The portal admin may also have different ideas about what to use for criteria when selecting between the sites.

We also need to allow for the user to manually select which site they wish to visit and to override the default selected site. This will allow users on a mobile device to access the main site if needed.